Jorgen Ellis is the CEO and co-founder of Strolll, a startup that has created augmented reality software for neurorehabilitation with a current focus on Parkinsons patients.
Founded in 2019, by Ellis with Thomas Finn, and Rupert Barksfield, Strolll’s commercially available AR glasses blend digital content with the physical world to assist treatments.
Strolll has received $6.7m in grant funding, including from the NHS, along with $3.6m from VCs. The Staffordshire-based startup says it is working with several NHS trusts.
At the age of 18 Ellis founded a separate company in New Zealand that partnered with IKEA to assemble the Swedish firm’s flatpack furniture, before exiting the business a few years later.
In this week’s Founder in Five Q&A, Ellis discusses the misunderstandings between AR and VR, the challenges of navigating medical device regulation, and why there are no shortcuts in health tech.
1. Which role was the most important early hire you made?
Jorgen Ellis: Navigating medical device regulation was a significant challenge for us in the early days of Strolll. One of the best decisions I have ever made was hiring a VP of regulatory affairs early on in our product development journey.
Although at the time we didn’t have a commercially available product, it did mean that we could be on the front foot when approaching regulatory bodies once we did. Founders in the healthcare space who bring in a regulatory specialist once they’ve already built the product tend to realise it’s too late.
2. What’s a common mistake that you see founders make?
JE: Founders who try to take shortcuts in the healthcare industry. I’ve heard from other health tech founders that they think working with the NHS is a slow, underfunded ‘brick wall’ process. In my experience, we’ve been really impressed with the openness of the NHS from their commitment to innovation to the support that’s been provided.
But you have to put in the hard work from the start and put your business in a position where the NHS can help and support you. Founders need to follow the pathways that have been laid out for them, but many try to shortcut and bypass these processes.
3. How do you motivate your team?
JE: The whole team is motivated by our north star – to be the most used rehabilitation software in the world. Everyone in the company can connect to that and contribute to it proactively and autonomously. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a software engineer or a salesperson; you can see on a daily basis how you are contributing to our goal.
Our mission drives us every day – it’s what we track our success against at our quarterly meetings and we are completely transparent in our personal objectives about how everyone is helping to achieve our goal. The impact of what we do is also motivating in and of itself. When we see videos of Parkinson’s patients using our products and we see their lives changing for the better, that is of course, intrinsically motivating.
4. In another life, you’d be?
JE: An accountant. I was once told that to be successful in the business world you need to be able to “speak the language of business”, which I understood to be accounting. I went to university to become an accountant, but I dropped out early on to found my first business, which has brought me to where I am today.
5. What’s the most misunderstood technology?
JE: People don’t really understand the differences between augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). AR glasses have see-through lenses which can interact with a real-world environment with depth and perception, rather than having it on a display screen like with VR.
Whenever people try AR for the first time, they are always blown away by how different it is and how it can seamlessly integrate with their real lives. I don’t think people know just yet how much AR will change their lives in the next five to ten years.
Founder in Five – a UKTN Q&A series with the entrepreneurs behind the UK’s innovative tech startups, scaleups and unicorns – is published every Friday.
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